You are here: Homepage » Articles » Case Study: Site Promotion

Case Study: What's the Connecting Thread between Barack Obamah, Joe the Plumber and Site Promotion?

5/10/2010
Background:
My name is Elad and I belong to the team working on marketing, distribution and optimization on aplumbers.com. In this site, that was constructed, planned and developed throughout a period of six months, was invested many market studies, and it constitutes a broad information center about plumbing issues in the USA.

In the period that preceded the site's launching Barack Obamah and John McCain competed for US Presidency. During a campaign stop in the State of Ohio on October 12th, 2008, Barak Obamah was asked by a plumber called Joe Wurzelbacher, that until then was anonymous, about his small business tax policies. The conversation that developed between the candidate for presidency and Joe, that in time was famously dubbed "Joe the Plumber", took 05:37 minutes, and resulted in Joe achieving publicity not only in the United States, but also internationally.

Those 05:37 minutes turned our publicity efforts required to promote our internet site immeasurably bigger from those that we took into account in the preliminary planning of the site's development. Why so?

As for now there are 829,000 references of Joe Wurzelbacher in Google. These references appear in several of the leading online news sites including, www.foxnews.com cnn, New York Times, www.huffingtonpost.com, abcnews, and many more important newspapers, not only from America, but from the whole world.

In fact, nearly every city Wurzelbacher visits and wins press coverage, his name jumps to the top of the search results according to the word "Plumber" and the name of the city he has visited. This is due to the references in important sources (mainly newspapers, as already mentioned) that refer to his visit in that city. The quoting sources are regarded as credible according to different measures specified by leading search engines, and therefore a combination of the words "plumber" (reminding you that Joe was famously dubbed "Joe the Plumber") with the name of any city, almost automatically jumps to the top of search results in different sites.

How can we compete with this kind of "threat"?
To overcome the damage in ranking following Wurzelbacher top ranking in different cities (and sometimes in nationwide searches) we use plenty of articles discussing different aspects of plumbing. We distribute these articles throughout the site, and by that increase not only the scope of the search words through which people arrive to our sites, but also achieve referrals from outside sources that quote us. This entails hard research, nonstop maintenance of high quality content, and of course, allocation of financial resources that enable us to preserve an interesting, informative and an updated site. We believe that by means of an updated content, the vast scope of information in the site and the interesting material discussed, we will succeed in the long run to overcome the difficulty posed (not intentionally, of course) by President Obamah and Joe the Plumber.

Share|